i threw it into my trusty DZsoft perl editor, just to see if it would error out, and it did not error out (other than the fact that it did not have that sub routine to call to) so i figure if nothing else, it is simply a call to that sub-routine, with those 4 constants sent to it also., the = 0 at the end.. just a thought, but could that be a way of faking perl into believing that the sub routine always returns 0?

i am pretty much just winging it on those suggestions, but i do ask that if anyone can rule them out, let me know, cause i am also curious..

As always, Google was very helpful in finding an answer. The strace command traces the system calls a process makes. So, when a process opens a file, you'll see a line like

Code

open("/dev/null", O_RDONLY) = 3

This has nothing to do with Perl, except for the fact that sometimes you open files in Perl scripts, too. The mysterious looking =3 at the end of line isn't that mysterious if you know that the output isn't supposed to be Perl code. It's simply the return value of the system call. Now, what made even me believe in the first place that your snippet could be Perl code was the use of [ ] (reference to empty array):

Code

rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, NULL, [], 8) = 0

But what looks like an empty array is in fact a bit field with no bits set at all. If you had some bits set, this might have looked like